Power for the Plantationocene: solar parks as the colonial form of an energy plantation
Ryan Stock
Abstract
Solar park development in India constitutes racial regimes of land ownership, as solar-related dispossessions produce a highly racialized (through caste) and gendered surplus population of landless peasants. Conceptualizing the power relations of solar power through the Plantationocene, I argue the highly ordered form of the solar park is a set of neocolonial social relations akin to an energy plantation; an archetype of an imperative, idealized and racialized reordering of nature, economy and society to power a more sustainable world-system. Agrarian climate justice requires intersectional peasant coalitions struggling to transform neocolonial land politics and implementing redistributive and emancipatory solar interventions.
Topics & Concepts
PeasantAgrarian societyCasteSociologyPopulationPower (physics)PoliticsEnergy povertyPolitical scienceEconomic systemEconomicsGeographyLawAgriculturePathologyPhysicsArchaeologyAlternative medicinePanacea (medicine)MedicineQuantum mechanicsDemographyAgriculture, Land Use, Rural DevelopmentPolitical Economy and MarxismWater Governance and Infrastructure